ONE critical reason why airline passengers cooperated with the intrusive screening that followed 9/11, and grudgingly tolerated its excesses, was the sense that we were all in this together. And we were. First class and tourist, Cabinet secretary and custodian alike removed their belts and shoes.

Now the Transportation Security Administration is considering creating a separate VIP screening. Travelers willing to pay a fee to a private company, probably $80 or more, undergo a background check and provide some sort of biometric ID will be able to breeze through a separate screening — and keep their shoes on and their pants up.

In a pilot program at Orlando International Airport, according to testimony before Congress, the average wait for the VIP screening was four seconds, for regular people, over four minutes. The maximum wait time for the VIPs was three minutes, the maximum for regular people, over half an hour.

Understandably, frequent fliers like the idea, but its a bad one.

First, the screening is federally mandated and ultimately taxpayer-paid. The government should not be creating preferred classes of people. Second, it is bureaucratically inevitable that the preferred program will make the lines longer for those passengers not in it. Third, the indignities foisted on VIPs — like hassling Sen. Ted Kennedy because his name turned up on a terrorist watch list — are a powerful incentive for the TSA to clean up its act. Its a fact of life that bureaucracies tend to ignore the powerless. And, finally, the cursory VIP screening would be available to any terrorist with $80 and a clean background.

If the TSA wants to make screening more efficient and less intrusive, it should do so for everybody. We should all be in this together.

Three women have told the New York Times that music mogul Russell Simmons raped them, the latest in a cascade of serious allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men in entertainment, media, politics and elsewhere.